A distinct decline in horseshoe crab numbers has occurred that parallels climate change linked to the end of the last Ice Age, as per a research studythat used genomics to assess historical trends in population sizes.
The new research also indicates that horseshoe crabs numbers may continue to decline in the future because of predicted climate change, said Tim King, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a main author on the newly released study published in Molecular Ecology.
While the current decline in horseshoe crabs is attributed in great part to overharvest for fishing bait and for the pharmaceutical industry, the new research indicates that climate change also appears to have historically played a role in altering the numbers of successfully reproducing horseshoe crabs. More importantly, said King, predicted future climate change, with its accompanying sea-level rise and water temperature fluctuations, may well limit horseshoe crab distribution and interbreeding, resulting in distributional changes and localized and regional population declines, such as happened after the last Ice Age.
"Using genetic variation, we determined the trends between past and present population sizes of horseshoe crabs and observed that a clear decline in the number of horseshoe crabs has occurred that parallels climate change linked to the end of the last Ice Age," said King.........
EdmontonInorganic elements known to be toxic at low concentrations are being discharged to air and water by oilsands mining and processing as per University of Alberta (U of A) research findings being published this month in one of the world's top scientific journals.
The 13 elements being discharged include mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and several other metals known to be toxic at trace levels. The paper will appear in the August 30 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The results are not surprising as per corresponding author David Schindler an internationally acclaimed researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at the U of A given the huge amounts of a number of of the same elements that the industry has reported discharging, as per Environment Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory.
"Given the large amounts of pollutants released, any monitoring program that cannot detect increases in the environment must be considered as incompetent," says Schindler, referring to the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program.
"The U of A study was deliberately designed to test claims by industry and Alberta politicians that all contaminants in the river are from natural sources," said Schindler.........
Anger, depression, and helplessness are the main psychological responses being seen in response to the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and they are likely to have long-lasting effects, as per an interview in Ecopsychology, a peer-evaluated, online journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The interview is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/eco.
The anger being expressed in response to the recent BP oil rig explosion and resulting spill of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is "a way of masking the really unfathomable and profound despair that is just under the surface as we watch this catastrophe unfold," says Deborah Du Nann Winter, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA). In an interview published in Ecopsychology and conducted by Editorial Board member Susan Koger, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Willamette University in Salem, OR, Winter predicts a great deal of chronic depression, withdrawal, and lack of functioning among not only people directly affected by the events in the Gulf, but also people nationwide and globally who identify or empathize with their circumstances.
Describing the oil spill as "the absolutely worst 'environmental' disaster" in the history of the United States, Winter discusses her own personal attempts to deal with the negative emotions she is experiencing by focusing at times on hopeful, positive feelings correlation to the "tremendous self-sacrifice and generosity of spirit" among those affected by the spill and those helping to contain it and clean up the oil.........
Expedition leader, Kenny Broad, Director of UM's Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, and Associate Professor at UM's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science ascends from a deep chamber in a Bahamian blue hole.
Credit: Wes Skiles
The cover story of the most recent issue of National Geographic Magazine (August 2010) features a University of Miami (UM) led expedition to the underwater caves of the Bahamas, known as 'blue holes.' These unique environments are one of the least understood ecosystems on the planet, largely due to the challenges involved in studying these extreme environments, which include complete darkness, dramatic reversing currents, extreme depths, poisonous gasses, and silty, tight squeezes. The expedition made significant findings correlation to the past history of the earth, including human occupation, previously undiscovered microbial life, and abrupt climatic changes.
The expedition was conceived of and led by National Geographic Emerging Explorer Kenny Broad, Director of UM's Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, and Associate Professor at UM's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Funded by The National Geographic Society, the National Museum of the Bahamas, and the National Science Foundation, this work included more than 150 dives and involved unique collaboration between cave divers, researchers from several different fields, and a specialized film team led by the late Wes Skiles, a renowned filmmaker, conservationist and cave explorer. The expedition also was featured in a one-hour NOVA PBS special entitled "Extreme Cave Diving".........
Foraminifera from the core samples, examined while at sea.
Radiocarbon dating is used to determine the age of everything from ancient artifacts to prehistoric corals on the ocean bottom.
But in a recent study appearing in the Aug. 26 edition of the journal, Nature, a Lawrence Livermore scientist and colleagues used the method to trace the pathway of carbon dioxide released from the deep ocean to the atmosphere at the end of the last ice age.
The team noticed that a rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations coincided with a reduced amount of carbon-14 relative to carbon-12 (the two isotopes of carbon that are used for carbon dating and are referred to as radiocarbon) in the atmosphere.
"This suggests that there was a release of very 'old' or low 14/12CO2 from the deep ocean to the atmosphere during the end of the last ice age," said Tom Guilderson, an author on the paper and a scientist at LLNL's Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry.
The study suggests that CO2 release may speed up the melting following an ice age.
Radiocarbon in the atmosphere is regulated largely by ocean circulation, which controls the sequestration of CO2 in the deep sea through atmosphere-ocean carbon exchange. During the last ice age ( approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years ago), lower atmospheric CO2 levels were accompanied by increased atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations that have been credited to greater storage of CO2 in a poorly ventilated abyssal ocean.........
UCI seismologist Lisa Grant Ludwig Credit: Daniel A. Anderson / Univ. Communications
Earthquakes have rocked the powerful San Andreas fault that splits California far more often than previously thought, as per UC Irvine and Arizona State University scientists who have charted temblors there stretching back 700 years.
The findings, to be reported in the Sept. 1 issue of Geology, conclude that large ruptures have occurred on the Carrizo Plain portion of the fault - about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles - as often as every 45 to 144 years. But the last big quake was in 1857, more than 150 years ago.
UCI scientists said that while it's possible the fault is experiencing a natural lull, they think it's more likely a major quake could happen soon.
"If you're waiting for somebody to tell you when we're close to the next San Andreas earthquake, just look at the data," said UCI seismologist Lisa Grant Ludwig, principal investigator on the study.
An associate professor of public health, she hopes the findings will serve as a wake-up call to Californians who've grown complacent about the risk of major earthquakes. She said the new data "puts the exclamation point" on the need for state residents and policymakers to be prepared.
For individuals, that means having ample water and other supplies on hand, safeguarding possessions in advance, and establishing family emergency plans. For regulators, Ludwig advocates new policies requiring earthquake risk signs on unsafe buildings and forcing inspectors in home-sale transactions to disclose degrees of risk.........
This is an image of WD-P3 aircraft on the tarmac that was used for a petrochemical pollution study in Houston by CIRES, a joint institute of the University of Colorado and NOAA.
Credit: Photo by Bill Dube/NOAA
A thick blanket of yellow haze hovering over Houston as a result of chemical pollution produced by manufacturing petroleum products appears to be getting a little bit thinner, as per a newly released study.
But the new findings -- which have implications for petrochemical-producing cities around the world -- come with a catch, says a team of researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The problem is that industry still significantly underestimates the amounts of reactive chemicals being released into the air, as per airplane measurements made by the research team as part of the study. Inaccuracies in the reporting of emissions pose big challenges for the reduction and regulation of emissions coming from petrochemical plants. The emissions are important to monitor, because some chemicals released from the plants react to form ground-level ozone that can be harmful to human health and agricultural crops.
"Emissions may have decreased some, but there's still a long way to go," said study author Joost de Gouw, a CIRES atmospheric scientist. "And the emission inventories by industry were not any better in 2006 than they were in 2000".........
Scientists have found a primitive Earth mantle reservoir on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Geologist Matthew Jackson and colleagues from a multi-institution collaboration report the finding--the first discovery of what appears to be a primitive Earth mantle--this week in the journal Nature.
The Earth's mantle is a rocky, solid shell that is between the Earth's crust and the outer core, and makes up about 84 percent of the Earth's volume. The mantle is made up of a number of distinct portions or reservoirs that have different chemical compositions.
Researchers had previously concluded that the Earth was slightly older than 4.5 billion years old, but had not found a piece of the Earth's primitive mantle.
Until recently, scientists generally thought that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system were chondritic, meaning that the mantle's chemistry was believed to be similar to that of chondrites--some of the oldest, most primitive objects in the solar system. Assuming a chondritic model of the Earth, a piece of the primitive mantle would have certain isotope ratios of the chemical elements of helium, lead and neodymium.
The model that the Earth was chondritic was called into question with a discovery five years ago by a team at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which suggested the ratio of neodymium on Earth was higher than what would be expected if the Earth were indeed chondritic.........
The paleomagnetic record from the Amadeus Basin in Australia (marked by the star) indicate a large shift in some parts of the Gondwana supercontinent relative to the South Pole. (Illustration: Ross Mitchell/Yale University)
The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth's surface during the Early Cambrian period, as per new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth's landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the recent issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that existed at a crucial period in Earth's evolutionary history called the Cambrian explosion, when most of the major groups of complex animals rapidly appeared.
The team studied the paleomagnetic record of the Amadeus Basin in central Australia, which was part of the Gondwana precursor supercontinent. Based on the directions of the ancient rock's magnetization, they discovered that the entire Gondwana landmass underwent a rapid 60-degree rotational shift, with some regions attaining a speed of at least 16 (+12/-8) cm/year, about 525 million years ago. By comparison, the fastest shifts we see today are at speeds of about four cm/year.
This was the first large-scale rotation that Gondwana underwent after forming, said Ross Mitchell, a Yale graduate student and author of the study. The shift could either be the result of plate tectonics (the individual motion of continental plates with respect to one another) or "true polar wander," in which the Earth's solid land mass (down to the liquid outer core almost 3,000 km deep) rotates together with respect to the planet's rotational axis, changing the location of the geographic poles, Mitchell said.........
The team at NEEM celebrates the final core sample collected at bedrock level, or over 8,300 feet beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The multi-year drilling project was a collaboration of scientists from 14 different countries and sought to gather ice core samples from the Eemian period, about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. The Eemian period ice cores should yield a host of information about conditions on Earth during that time of abrupt climate change, giving climate scientists valuable data about future conditions as our own climate changes.
Credit: NEEM Project Office
After years of concentrated effort, researchers from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project hit bedrock more than 8,300 feet below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet last week. The project has yielded ice core samples that may offer valuable insights into how the world can change during periods of abrupt warming.
Led by Denmark and the United States, and comprised of researchers from 14 countries, the NEEM team has been working to get at the ice near bedrock level because that ice dates back to the Eemian interglacial period, about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, when temperatures on Earth were warmer by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit than they are today. The Eemian period ice cores should yield a host of information about conditions on Earth during that time of abrupt climate change, giving climate researchers valuable data about future conditions as our own climate changes.
"Researchers from 14 countries have come together in a common effort to provide the science our leaders and policy makers need to plan for our collective future," said Jim White, director of University of Colorado at Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and an internationally known ice core expert. White was the lead U.S. investigator on the project, and his work there was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs. Other U.S. institutions collaborating on the NEEM effort include Oregon State University, Penn State, the University of California, San Diego, and Dartmouth College.........
NSF has awarded a Gulf oil spill rapid response grant to study the Florida Everglades.
Credit: National Park Service
With its vast 1.5 million acres of mangrove swamps, sawgrass prairies and subtropical jungles, could the Florida Everglades--the famous river of grass--be affected by the Gulf oil spill?
While current estimates are that little if any oil entered the Loop Current or reached the Everglades, this area is a significant national natural resource, and to study the effects of the spill on seagrasses and mangrove forests in and near the Everglades, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a rapid response grant to researchers affiliated with NSF's Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site."
The area is one of 26 such NSF LTER sites around the world.
"The Florida Coastal Everglades LTER site is located within the boundaries of Everglades National Park, an important natural resource," says Todd Crowl, LTER program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which co-funded the research with NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences.
"This research will document the extent of the spill's impact on the Everglades ecosystem as a whole".
In south Florida, open water, seagrass, and mangrove habitats could receive large amounts of oil and dispersants from the spill, says James Fourqurean of Florida International University (FIU), who was awarded the grant along with Evelyn Gaiser of FIU.........
Satellite image from Aug. 5, 2010, shows the huge ice island calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. Courtesy of Prof. Andreas Muenchow, University of Delaware
A University of Delaware researcher reports that an "ice island" four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.
"In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland," said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Muenchow's research in Nares Strait, between Greenland and Canada, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shelf.
Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service discovered the ice island within hours after NASA's MODIS-Aqua satellite took the data on Aug. 5, at 8:40 UTC (4:40 EDT), Muenchow said. These raw data were downloaded, processed, and analyzed at the University of Delaware in near real-time as part of Muenchow's NSF research.
Petermann Glacier, the parent of the new ice island, is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves. The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean.........
In a pioneering use of computed tomography (CT) scans, researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have discovered that carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming is in the process of killing off a major coral species in the Red Sea. As summer sea surface temperatures have remained about 1.5 degrees Celsius above ambient over the last 10 years, growth of the coral, Diploastrea heliopora, has declined by 30% and "could cease growing altogether by 2070" or sooner, they report in the July 16 issue of the journal Science.
"The warming in the Red Sea and the resultant decline in the health of this coral is a clear regional impact of global warming," said Neal E. Cantin, a WHOI postdoctoral investigator and co-lead researcher on the project. In the 1980s, he said, "the average summer [water] temperatures were below 30 degrees Celsius. In 2008 they were approaching 31 degrees".
Cantin and WHOI Research Specialist Anne L. Cohen, the other lead investigator, said the findings were unexpected because D. heliopora did not exhibit one of the typical signs of thermal stress: bleaching. "These corals looked healthy," said Cohen.
But Computerized axial tomography scanning of the coral's skeletal structure in the laboratory revealed "the secrets that the skeletons are hiding," she said. "The Computerized axial tomography scans reveal that these corals have actually been under chronic stress for the last 10 years, and that the rates of growth were the lowest in 2008," the final year of the study.........
By 2039, most of the US could experience at least four seasons equally as intense as the hottest season ever recorded from 1951-1999, according to Stanford University climate scientists. In most of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, the number of extremely hot seasons could be as high as seven.
Credit: Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford University
Exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next 30 years, as per a newly released study by Stanford University climate scientists.
"Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades," said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the main author of the study.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Diffenbaugh concluded that hot temperature extremes could become frequent events in the U.S. by 2039, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.
"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," said Diffenbaugh, a center fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. "Those kinds of severe heat events also put enormous stress on major crops like corn, soybean, cotton and wine grapes, causing a significant reduction in yields".
The GRL study took two years to complete and is co-authored by Moetasim Ashfaq, a former Stanford postdoctoral fellow now at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The study comes on the heels of a recent NASA report, which concluded that the prior decade, January 2000 to December 2009, was the warmest on record.........
Man-made global warming started with ancient hunters
Even before the dawn of agriculture, people may have caused the planet to warm up, a newly released study suggests.
Mammoths used to roam modern-day Russia and North America, but are now extinct-and there's evidence that around 15,000 years ago, early hunters had a hand in wiping them out. A newly released study, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), argues that this die-off had the side effect of heating up the planet.
"A lot of people still believe that people are unable to affect the climate even now, even when there are more than 6 billion people," says the main author of the study, Chris Doughty of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. The new results, however, "show that even when we had populations orders of magnitude smaller than we do now, we still had a big impact".
In the newly released study, Doughty, Adam Wolf, and Chris Field-all at Carnegie Institution for Science-propose a scenario to explain how hunters could have triggered global warming.
First, mammoth populations began to drop-both because of natural climate change as the planet emerged from the last ice age, and because of human hunting. Normally, mammoths would have grazed down any birch that grew, so the area stayed a grassland. But if the mammoths vanished, the birch could spread. In the cold of the far north, these trees would be dwarfs, only about 2 meters (6 feet) tall. Nonetheless, they would dominate the grasses.........
A DOE study will test the impact of increased temperature on Arctic tundra (photo provided by researcher Stan Wullschleger).
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are planning a large-scale, long-term ecosystem experiment to test the effects of global warming on the icy layers of arctic permafrost.
While ORNL scientists have conducted extensive studies on the impact of climate change in temperate regions like East Tennessee, less is known about the impact global warming could have on arctic regions.
"We're beginning to take these lessons learned and start applying them to sensitive and globally important ecosystems, such as the arctic," said Stan Wullschleger of the Environmental Sciences Division. "The arctic regions are important to the topic of global warming because of the large land area they occupy around the world and the layer of permanently frozen soil, known according tomafrost."
Wullschleger and a team of architects, engineers and biologists from ORNL and other national laboratories design, simulate using computers and then field test large-scale manipulative experiments that purposely warm a test area in order to evaluate ecosystem response to projected climate conditions.
"Evidence is emerging that the arctic is experiencing a greater degree of warming than the rest of the globe," Wullschleger said. "There is growing concern that this warming is already affecting a wide range of physical and ecological processes in the arctic, including permafrost degradation. Manipulative experiments will help us study these processes and their consequences in great detail."........
The prototype of Hamelinck's mirror system in one of its assembly steps. Photo: Roger Hamelinck
A sharp view of the starry sky is difficult, because the atmosphere constantly distorts the image. TU/e researcher Roger Hamelinck developed a new type of telescope mirror, which quickly corrects the image. His prototypes are mandatory for future large telescopes, but also gives old telescopes a sharper view.
The atmosphere contains 'bubbles' of hot and cold air, each with their own refractive index, which distort the image. As a result, the light reaching ground-based telescopes is distorted. Hamelinck's system tackles this problem with a deformable mirror in the telescope. Under this ultrathin mirror there are actuators, which can wherever necessary quickly create bumps and dimples in the mirror. These bumps and dimples correct the continuously changing distortion created in the atmosphere. This is of crucial importance to the new generation of large telescopes in particular. Hamelinck: "In principle, larger telescopes also have a higher resolution, but attaining an optimal optical quality is hampered by the atmosphere. Therefore you absolutely need these corrections."
Modular
The principle of the 'adaptive deformable mirror' has been known some fifty odd years, but was limited particularly by the technology. Thus, the actuators of earlier systems generated much heat, which caused the systems themselves to become a source of distortion. "Contrary to the old systems, this new system has an ultrathin mirror, so that very little power is needed for its deformation ", Hamelinck explains. "In combination with the efficient, electromagnetic reluctance actuators, this reduces the heat generation of the system to a very low level. Thanks to this, no active cooling is required." Hamelinck's working prototype has a five-centimeter diameter. Given that the design is scalable and expandable with modules, the system is suited for very large telescopes, such as the future 42-meter-big E-ELT (European Extra Large Telescope). The E-ELT is fitted inter alia with an adaptive mirror of 2.4 meters.........
A critical minimum for Arctic sea ice can also be expected for late summer 2010. Researchers from the German "Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI)" in Bremerhaven and from "KlimaCampus" of the University of Hamburg have now published their projections in the current Sea Ice Outlook. The online publication compares the forecasts on ice cover for September 2010 prepared by around a dozen international research institutes in a scientific "competition". The ice reaches its minimum area at this time every year.
The forecast developed by the team from KlimaCampus of the University of Hamburg, i.e. 4.7 million square kilometres (km2), is more negative than that submitted by the AWI researchers, who arrived at a figure of 5.2 million km2. Nevertheless, neither of the two research groups anticipates that the record minimum of 4.3 million km2 in 2007 will be reached.
Eventhough Arctic ice currently has an area of ten million km2, which is half a million km2 smaller than in 2007, one cannot directly conclude a new record minimum in late summer. The present ice cover is comparable to that in June 2006, a year when more ice area remained in September than in 2007. The decisive factors for the situation in late summer, such as the ice thickness in the central Arctic and further development of the weather in summer, are still not known, however.........
The approach the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural anaerobic lagoons that treat manure contains errors and may underestimate methane emissions by up to 65%, as per researchers from the University of Missouri.
Anaerobic lagoons treat manure on some animal feeding operations previous to application to crops as a fertilizer. Methane, one byproduct of the therapy process, has 21 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.
A 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling mandated the EPA consider greenhouse gases a pollutant. This led the EPA in 2009 to approve greenhouse gas reporting requirements for any facility that annually releases 25,000 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide equivalents to the atmosphere. The objective of these reporting requirements is to quantify emissions as a first step towards developing strategies to reduce greenhouse gas losses.
Direct measurements of methane emissions from anaerobic lagoons are technically difficult and very expensive, so the EPA adopted a calculation method to estimate methane emissions from anaerobic digesters. They relied on the method used by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their 2006 worldwide estimate of greenhouse inventories.........
As turboprop and jet aircraft climb or descend under certain atmospheric conditions, they can inadvertently seed mid-level clouds and cause narrow bands of snow or rain to develop and fall to the ground, new research finds. Through this seeding process, they leave behind odd-shaped holes or channels in the clouds, which have long fascinated the public.
The key ingredient for developing these holes in the clouds: water droplets at subfreezing temperatures, below about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (-15 degrees Celsius). As air is cooled behind aircraft propellers or over jet wings, the water droplets freeze and drop toward Earth.
"Any time aircraft fly through these specific conditions, they are altering the clouds in a way that can result in enhanced precipitation nearby," says Andrew Heymsfield, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and main author of a newly released study into the phenomenon. "Just by flying an airplane through these clouds, you could produce as much precipitation as with seeding materials along the same path in the cloud".
Precipitation from planes appears to be especially common in regions such as the Pacific Northwest and western Europe because of the frequent occurrence of cloud layers with supercooled droplets, Heymsfield says.........
Large majority of Americans still believe in global warming
Three out of four Americans think that the Earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it, as per a new survey by scientists at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
The survey was conducted by Woods Institute Senior Fellow Jon Krosnick, a professor of communication and of political science at Stanford, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The results are based on telephone interviews conducted from June 1-7 with 1,000 randomly selected American adults.
"Several national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans think that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people," Krosnick said. "But our new survey shows just the opposite".
For example, when respondents in the June 2010 survey were asked if the Earth's temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent said yes. And 75 percent said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred. Krosnick has asked similar questions in prior Woods Institute polls since 2006.
"Our surveys reveal a small decline in the proportion of people who believe global warming has been happening, from 84 percent in 2007 to 74 percent today," Krosnick said. "Statistical analysis of our data revealed that this decline is attributable to perceptions of recent weather changes by the minority of Americans who have been skeptical about climate scientists".........
Oil from spill could have powered 38,000 cars for year
Sunlight illuminated the lingering oil slick off the Mississippi Delta on May 24, 2010. Image courtesy of NASA.
As of today (Wednesday, June 9), if all the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico had been used for fuel, it could have powered 38,000 cars, and 3,400 trucks, and 1,800 ships for a full year, as per University of Delaware Prof. James J. Corbett. That's based on the estimated spill rate of 19,000 barrels of oil per day.
Corbett, a professor of marine policy in UD's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, works on energy and environmental solutions for transportation. He has launched a website that reports the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in terms of lost uses of the lost fuel on a daily basis.
Visitors to the website can choose the spill rate they believe is most accurate from a range of reported estimates, and the website will automatically calculate how a number of cars, trucks, and ships could have been powered for a year, based on Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Here are just a few of Corbett's findings:
By May 5 (15 days after the spill), the oil lost could have fueled 470 container ships serving New York and New Jersey ports for a year.
By May 25 (35 days after the spill), energy from the spilled oil could have provided a year's gasoline for all registered automobiles (about 26,000 cars) in Newark, Del., where UD's main campus is located.
Researchers are reporting a new technique for mapping and testing oil-contaminated soils. Traditionally, samples need to be collected from the field and returned to a lab for extensive chemical analysis, costing time and money when neither is readily available during a clean-up operation. The new method can take measurements in the field and accurately predict the total amount of petroleum contaminants in moist, unprepared soil samples.
The research team led was by soil researchers David Weindorf from Louisiana State University, Cristine Morgan of Texas Agrilife Research, and John Galbraith from Virginia Tech. The method they investigated used visible near infrared light with diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, shining a light on a sample and reading the reflecting wavelengths. This allowed the scientists to rapidly evaluate soils for the presence and amount of oil contamination quickly while in the field, without sending a sample to a laboratory and waiting for test results. The technique was used to predict total petroleum hydrocarbons in a variety of soils in southern Louisiana.
Results from the study were published in the July-August 2010 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, a publication of the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America. Funded by the Louisiana Applied Oil Spill Research Program, the research was also presented at Clean Gulf 2009 in New Orleans, LA and the 2009 Soil Science Society of America International Annual Meetings in Pittsburgh, PA.........
Public concern about global warming is once again on the rise, as per a national survey released recently by scientists at Yale and George Mason Universities. The results come as the U.S. Senate prepares to vote this week on a resolution to block the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Since January, public belief that global warming is happening rose four points, to 61 percent, while belief that it is caused mostly by human activities rose three points, to 50 percent. The number of Americans who worry about global warming rose three points, to 53 percent. And the number of Americans who said that the issue is personally important to them rose five points, to 63 percent.
"The stabilization and slight rebound in public opinion is occurring amid signs the economy is starting to recover, along with consumer confidence, and as memories of unusual snowstorms and scientific scandals recede," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. "The BP oil disaster is also reminding the public of the dark side of dependence on fossil fuels, which appears to be increasing support for clean energy policies".
Americans who said President Obama and Congress should make developing sources of clean energy a high priority increased 11 points, to 71 percent, while those who said that global warming should be a high priority rose six points, to 44 percent. In a seven-point increase since January, 69 percent of Americans said that the United States should make a large or medium effort to reduce global warming even if it incurs large or moderate economic costs.........
Global warming may present a threat to animal and plant life even in biodiversity hot spots once thought less likely to suffer from climate change, as per a newly released study from Rice University.
Research by Amy Dunham, a Rice assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, detailed for the first time a direct connection between the frequency of El Nio and a threat to life in Madagascar, a tropical island that acts as a refuge for a number of unique species that exist nowhere else in the world. In this case, the lemur plays the role of the canary in the coal mine.
The study in the journal Global Change Biology is currently available online and will be included in an upcoming print issue.
Dunham said most studies of global warming focus on temperate zones. "We all know about the polar bears and their melting sea ice," she said. "But tropical regions are often thought of as refuges during past climate events, so they haven't been given as much attention until recently.
"We're starting to realize that not only are these hot spots of biodiversity facing habitat degradation and other anthropogenic effects, but they're also being affected by the same changes we feel in the temperate zones".
Dunham's interest in lemurs, which began as an undergraduate student at Connecticut College, resulted in a groundbreaking study last year that provided new insight into a long-standing mystery: Why male and female lemurs are the same size.........
Every minute, 10,000 gallons of water mysteriously gush out of the desert floor at a place called Ash Meadows, an oasis that is home to 24 plant and animal species found nowhere else in the world.
A new Brigham Young University study indicates that the water arriving at Ash Meadows is completing a 15,000-year journey, flowing slowly underground from what is now the Nevada Test Site.
The U.S. government tested nuclear bombs there for four decades, and a crack in the Earth's crust known as the "Gravity Fault" connects its aquifer with Ash Meadows.
It will presumably be another 15,000 years before radioactive water surfaces at Ash Meadows, Nelson said. A more pressing issue for wildlife managers at Ash Meadows is the current decline in populations of Devil's Hole Pupfish and three other endangered fish species.
"Since the crust in Western states is being pulled apart east to west, it creates north-south fault lines such as this one that guides groundwater from one geographically closed basin to another," said Stephen Nelson, a BYU geology professor and co-author of the study.........
Understanding of 2002 break-up of Antarctic ozone hole
Research work on the flow of particles that, in part, relate to pollution dispersion, was conducted by Shane Ross, a Virginia Tech assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, and featured in Chaos magazine.
Credit: Virginia Tech Photo
The eruption of the volcano in Iceland has drawn attention to air flow patterns, as airlines lost millions of dollars and travelers remained stranded for days to weeks, as particles from the natural disaster traveled over Europe, forcing closures of major airports.
The flow of particles, eventhough seemingly random, can be characterized more effectively, as per work done by Virginia Tech's Shane Ross of the engineering science and mechanics (ESM) department and his colleague Francois Lekien of cole Polytechnique, Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, who reported their findings in the publication Chaos http://chaos.aip.org/chaoeh/v20/i1.
Their research "will aid researchers and engineers in understanding and in controlling this type of global-scale phenomena, such as pollution dispersion in the atmosphere and the ocean, and large-scale transport of biological organisms, including airborne plant pathogens and respiratory disease agents," said Ishwar Puri, head of the ESM department at Virginia Tech.
For example, the current British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, might be modeled using Ross and Lekien's findings to provide greater insight into how the particles might be dragged into the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current.
In explaining how they conducted their research on the flow of particles, Ross and Lekien said they employed existing scientific principles of Lagrangian coherent structures, which reveals the separation of the atmosphere into dynamically distinct regions, to investigate the shapes of geophysical flow patterns. http://www.esm.vt.edu/person.php?id=10139.........
Let a bunch of fluorine atoms get together in the molecules of a chemical compound, and they're like a heavy metal band at a chamber music festival. They tend to dominate the proceedings and not always for the better.
That's especially true where the global warming potential of the chemicals is concerned, says a newly released study by NASA and Purdue University researchers.
The study offers at least a partial recipe that industrial chemists could use in developing alternatives with less global warming potential than materials usually used today. The study was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"What we're hoping is that these additional requirements for minimizing global warming will be used by industry as design constraints for making materials that have, perhaps, the most green chemistry," says Joseph Francisco, a Purdue chemistry and earth and atmospheric sciences professor.
The classes of chemicals examined in the study are widely used in air conditioning and the manufacturing of electronics, appliances and carpets. Other uses range from applications as a blood substitute to tracking leaks in natural gas lines.
The chemicals include fluorine atom-containing compounds such as hydro fluorocarbons, per fluorocarbons, hydrofluoroethers, hydrofluoroolefins, and sulfur and nitrogen fluorides.........
Aboriginal hunting and burning increase Australia's desert biodiversity
Martu hunter Burchell Taylor burns a clump of spinifex grass to reveal lizard burrows in Australia's Western Desert.
In Australia, Martu hunter-gatherers light fires to expose the hiding places of their prey: monitor lizards called goanna that can grow up to 6 feet long. These generations-old hunting practices, part of the Martu day-to-day routine, have reshaped Australia's Western Desert habitats, as per Stanford University anthropologists Douglas and Rebecca Bird.
"Martu" refers to a group of about 800 indigenous Australians from eight dialect-groups that inhabit the Western Desert. For 10 years, the Birds have been investigating Martu hunting strategies and their lasting environmental impacts. With support from the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford, the scientists have begun to explore what makes aboriginal hunting grounds molded by fire more biologically diverse than lands untouched by humans.
"The results of our work will be used to assist conservation efforts and joint indigenous land management policy in the Western Desert," said Douglas Bird, an assistant professor (research) of anthropology and principal investigator on the Woods Institute Environmental Venture Projects grant.
In a number of cases, humans aren't the wrench in nature's gears but an important piece of the clockwork, he added. And because so much of Australia's Western Desert, from lizards to shrubs, revolves around Martu practices, conservation efforts will succeed only if they incorporate traditional goanna-hunting practices, he said.........
This map shows the flood-formed dunes in the area of Wasilla, Alaska. Flood waters flowed from right to left across the image. The dunes reach more than 110 feet high and are spaced more than a half-mile apart.
Credit: Michael Wiedmer
New research indicates that one of the largest fresh-water floods in Earth's history happened about 17,000 years ago and inundated a large area of Alaska that is now occupied in part by the city of Wasilla, widely known because of the 2008 presidential campaign.
The event was one of at least four "megafloods" as Glacial Lake Atna breached ice dams and discharged water. The lake covered more than 3,500 square miles in the Copper River Basin northeast of Anchorage and Wasilla.
The megaflood that covered the Wasilla region released as much as 1,400 cubic kilometers, or 336 cubic miles, of water, enough to cover an area the size of Washington, D.C., to a depth of nearly 5 miles. That water volume drained from the lake in about a week and, at such great velocity, formed dunes higher than 110 feet, with at least a half-mile between crests. The dunes appear on topographical maps but today are covered by roads, buildings and other development.
"Your mind doesn't get around dunes of that size. Obviously the water had to be very deep to form them," said Michael Wiedmer, an Anchorage native who is pursuing graduate studies in forest resources at the University of Washington.
Wiedmer is the main author of a paper describing the Wasilla-area megaflood, reported in the May edition of the journal Quaternary Research Co-authors are David R. Montgomery and Alan Gillespie, UW professors of Earth and space sciences, and Harvey Greenberg, a computer specialist in that department.........
Don Juan Pond in Antarctica, a roughly 1,000- by 400-meter basin, is by far the saltiest body of water on Earth. The specks of red in this image are researchers who are dwarfed by the steep, rocky cliffs around them.
Credit: The University of Georgia
In so a number of ways, Don Juan Pond in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica is one of the most unearthly places on the planet. An ankle-deep mirror between mountain peaks and rubbled moraine, the pond is an astonishing 18 times saltier than the Earth's oceans and virtually never freezes, even in temperatures of more than 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Now, a research team led by biogeochemists from the University of Georgia has discovered at the site a previously unreported chemical mechanism for the production of nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas. Possibly even more important, the discovery could help space researchers understand the meaning of similar brine pools in a place whose ecosystem most closely resembles that of Don Juan Pond: Mars.
The research, published April 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds an intriguing new variable to growing evidence that there has beenand may still beliquid water on Mars, a usual prerequisite for the formation of life. In fact, the new findings could help space researchers develop sensors for detecting such brines on Marsthus narrowing the search for places where life may exist.
"The pond's soils and brines and the surrounding rock types are similar to those found on Mars," said Samantha Joye, a faculty member in the department of marine sciences in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and main author on the paper. "So it provides an ideal location to assess microbial activity in extreme environments. While we did not detect any 'bio-gases' such as hydrogen sulfide and methane, we did, surprisingly, measure high concentrations of nitrous oxide, which is normally an indicator of microbial activity. We needed to find out whether a non-organic process could account for this nitrous oxide production".........
Riparian areas, ecosystems caught between the land and the stream, are subject to spatial and temporal variability. Effectively managing and protecting riparian areas as well as other ecosystems require understanding these concepts. Fortunately, researchers are investigating new approaches in experiential learning, or learning from direct experiences.
One of those approaches is photography. By taking photographs of a specific site for a period of years (repeat photography), you can see if changes have occurred. From the personal experiences of two researchers from the University of Arizona, Dr. George Zaimes and Dr. Michael Crimmins, illustrations can be effective educational tools for explaining difficult concepts; this is especially true in using before and after pictures of riparian sites or other natural ecosystems.
Zaimes and Crimmins developed two experiential learning exercises using existing repeat photographs of riparian areas in the state of Arizona that were presented in two different workshops. The results are reported in the 2010 Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education, published by the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America. Funding for this project was provided by University of Arizona Cooperative Extension.........
Scientists will map the rupture site of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile.
Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at the University of California at San Diego are undertaking an expedition to explore the rupture site of the 8.8-magnitude Chilean earthquake.
The quake is one of the largest in recorded history.
The researchers hope to capitalize on a unique scientific opportunity to capture fresh data from the event. They will study changes in the seafloor that resulted from movements along faults and submarine landslides.
The "rapid response" expedition, called the Survey of Earthquake And Rupture Offshore Chile, will take place aboard the research vessel Melville.
The Melville was conducting research off Chile when the earthquake struck.
"This rapid response cruise is a rare opportunity to better understand the processes that affect the generation and size of tsunamis," said Julie Morris, NSF division director for Ocean Sciences. "Seafloor evidence of the quake will contribute to understanding similar earthquake regions worldwide".
An important aspect of the rapid response mission involves swath multibeam sonar mapping of the seafloor to produce detailed topographic maps. Data from mapping the earthquake rupture zone will be made public soon after the research cruise ends, Morris said.........
The use of prescribed burns to manage western forests may help the United States reduce its carbon footprint.
Results of a newly released study find that such burns, often used by forest managers to reduce underbrush and protect bigger trees, release substantially less carbon dioxide emissions than wildfires of the same size.
"It appears that prescribed burns can be an important piece of a climate change strategy," says Christine Wiedinmyer, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and main author of the newly released study.
"If we reintroduce fires into our ecosystems, we appears to be able to protect larger trees and significantly reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by major wildfires".
The research results are published this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor.
Drawing on satellite observations and computer models of emissions, researchers concluded that widespread prescribed burns can reduce fire emissions of carbon dioxide in the West by an average of 18 to 25 percent, and by as much as 60 percent in certain forest systems.
Wildfires often consume large trees that store significant amounts of carbon, as per Steve Nelson, NSF program director for NCAR.........
Aquatic 'dead zones' contributing to climate change
The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived "dead zones" along the world's coasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters. In the March 12 edition of the journal Science, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer Dr. Lou Codispoti explains that the increased amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) produced in low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters can elevate concentrations in the atmosphere, further exacerbating the impacts of global warming and contributing to ozone "holes" that cause an increase in our exposure to harmful UV radiation.
"As the volume of hypoxic waters move towards the sea surface and expands along our coasts, their ability to produce the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide increases," explains Dr. Codispoti of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory. "With low-oxygen waters currently producing about half of the ocean's net nitrous oxide, we could see an additional significant atmospheric increase if these 'dead zones' continue to expand".
Eventhough present in minute concentrations in Earth's atmosphere, nitrous oxide is a highly potent greenhouse gas and is becoming a key factor in stratospheric ozone destruction. For the past 400,000 years, changes in atmospheric N2O appear to have roughly paralleled changes in carbon dioxide CO2 and have had modest impacts on climate, but this may change. Just as human activities appears to be causing an unprecedented rise in the terrestrial N2O sources, marine N2O production may also rise substantially as a result of nutrient pollution, warming waters and ocean acidification. Because the marine environment is a net producer of N2O, much of this production will be lost to the atmosphere, thus further intensifying its climatic impact.........
A recent discovery in understanding how to chemically break down the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a useful form opens the doors for researchers to wonder what organism is out there - or could be created - to accomplish the task.
University of Michigan biological chemist Steve Ragsdale, along with research assistant Elizabeth Pierce and researchers led by Fraser Armstrong from the University of Oxford in the U.K., have figured out a way to efficiently turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using visible light, like sunlight.
The results are published in the recent online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Not only is it a demonstration that an abundant compound can be converted into a commercially useful compound with considerably less energy input than current methods, it also is a method not so different from what organisms regularly do.
"This is a first step in showing it's possible, and imagine microbes doing something similar," Ragsdale said. "I don't know of any organism that uses light energy to activate carbon dioxide and reduce it to carbon monoxide, but I can imagine either finding an organism that can do it, or genetically engineering one to channel light energy to coax it to do that."
In this collaboration between Ann Arbor and Oxford, Ragsdale's laboratory at the U-M Medical School does the biochemistry and microbiology experiments and Armstrong's lab performs the physical- and photochemical applications.........
"Green" labels do not pack the same wallop for California wines that they do for low-energy appliances, organically grown produce and other environmentally friendly products, but it's not because there's anything wrong with the wine, a new UCLA-led study has observed.
In fact, wines made with organically grown grapes actually rate higher on a widely accepted ranking, said Magali Delmas, a UCLA environmental economist and the study's main author. And these wines tend to command a higher price than their conventionally produced counterparts, so long as wineries don't use the word "organic" on their labels.
But when wineries do use eco-labels, prices plummet.
"You've heard of the French paradox?" quipped Delmas, associate professor of management at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and the UCLA Anderson School of Management. "Well, this is the American version. You'd expect anything with an eco-label to command a higher price, but that's just not the case with California wine".
The anomaly points to a marketing conundrum for environmentally friendly vintners and a buying opportunity for oenophiles, say Delmas and her co-author, Laura E. Grant, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental science and management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.........
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